AYŞE SAKTANBER, Living Islam: Women, Religion and the Politicization of Culture in Turkey (London: I. B. Tauris, 2002). Pp. 309. $59.50 cloth

Extract

The Islamist movement in Turkey has gained more global relevance since a center-rightist offshoot of the conventional Islamist Milli Görüs came to power in 2002 and expressed willingness to cooperate with the United States for the occupation of Iraq. Living Islam is a timely contribution at a conjuncture when both scholars and the English-speaking public want to know more about the ideological, social, and political background of the movement. Ayşe Saktanber introduces the book with a relevant conceptual intervention in the field of Islamist studies. Arguing that the now fashionable “cultural Islam versus political Islam” dichotomy is not very useful, she posits “living Islam,” which she defines as the strategy by which the cultural is channeled into the political, as an alternative concept. Saktanber contends that differentiating between “the political” and “the cultural” by attributing danger to the former and naïveté to the latter ultimately leads to “forgetting” the significance of Islam and Islamization in recent Turkish history.